which she was leading. Along with the other aspiring intelligence officers, I watched Maxine as if she were a superstar.
‘But she worships James,’ I said.
‘You are admirably loyal, Holly, aren’t you? Am I correct in thinking that you gave up your place at Exeter University to look after your grandmother? You were going to read Modern Languages?’
‘I couldn’t leave my grandmother alone. I’d been trying to delay putting her in a nursing home, so I enrolled on a BA in English at Falmouth instead of the Exeter course – I can commute to Falmouth pretty easily from our house. I’m due to graduate this summer.’
‘You’re predicted a first.’
‘Yes. And I took every evening course they offered in French, Spanish, and German, to try to compensate for not being able to do Modern Languages. I’m fluent in all three – I studied them in school too.’
‘You got As for all three at A level, and an A in English Literature. Correct?’
‘Yes. And I can get by in Italian. I’ve been working towards a career in the Security Service for as long as I can remember.’
I had been obsessed with spies since I was a very little girl. My grandmother told me that my father used to play ‘I Spy’ with me, using the game to show me the world. I liked to imagine him in his blue-grey RAF uniform, pointing into the night, where he would soon be flying.
I Spy with my little eye, something far up in the sky …
… Moon.
When I was five, I tiptoed into the sitting room and hid behind my grandmother’s brown-velvet wingback chair to peek at a film she was watching. I sat, cross-legged, on her scratchy brown carpet, so perfectly still and quiet she never knew I was there. To this day I don’t know what the film was called. Only that it was about a spy who pretended to his family he was a boring businessman. Then, a bad spy injected him with truth serum, and this made him confess to his wife about his double life as an intelligence officer.
With the reasoning of a five-year-old, I decided to make my own truth serum and administer it to my grandmother, using the best available laboratory facilities. While she was cooking dinner, I sneaked into her bedroom and scooped out tiny spoonfuls of the lotions and scents on her dressing table, then stirred them into the moisturising cream she rubbed onto her face each night. My fantasy was that the serum would force my grandmother into revealing the secrets I was certain she was keeping about my parents.
When I was ready to begin the interrogation, I noticed that she had a bright-red and extremely bumpy rash on her cheeks. She never imagined the cause, and I crept back into her room to steal the cream away and dispose of it at the bottom of the kitchen rubbish so she would never use it again. I was frightened that I’d mortally injured her, but she seemed to recover quickly.
On my eighth birthday, Harriet the Spy appeared in my Christmas stocking, and Harriet became my absolute hero. She carried her spy notebook everywhere, so I did too, writing little observations about everything I saw. I made things up as well. It was only later that I learned that spies were supposed to keep to what was true, and were trained to be cautious about what they put on paper – two principles I wasn’t very good at heeding.
‘I can see that you have been commendably strategic and goal-driven in wanting to join us.’ Maxine gave me another of those intimate nods. ‘But in this line of work, how far would you push it? You’re very attractive.’ Despite the appeasing gestures, Maxine shifted the subject with the suddenness of a window exploding in a storm. ‘You know that.’
I blinked at this new Maxine. She was being kind but firm, friendly but still clearly the one with the power.
She pushed at me again. ‘Where does the line come, Holly?’
I realised I was biting the side of my lower lip, a sign of the anxiety I wanted to hide. ‘Emotional. Emotional involvement. That’s the line I wouldn’t cross.’
Maxine was in full-friend mode, pretending that the two of us were just ordinary women exchanging confidences. ‘So as long as it isn’t emotional …’ her voice was gentle, understanding ‘… physical involvement is okay – to – a – point.’ She tapped the table’s bevelled edge with her index finger, picking it up and setting it down again a few centimetres further along with her last three words, as if counting.
‘Are you asking – if I would sleep with someone for the role?’ I imagined Martin on the other side of the one-way glass, controlling any impulse to sit up straighter or open his mouth wide. He wouldn’t react at all.
‘Now that you mention it.’
I thought I was saying the right thing, but I pictured Martin, no longer able to disguise his interest, sticking his feet out and crossing them at the ankles, leaning back in his chair and shaking his head. Because he could see that I was a fish being reeled in. ‘No, No I wouldn’t.’
‘Are you sure?’ Maxine said this as if she were trying to help me, trying to tell me I had given the wrong answer and should flip it.
‘That would be like prostituting myself for the country. So no.’ My shoe was tapping wildly against the white-tiled floor. I froze, and the absence of noise from it was too noticeable.
‘Even if it was the only way to save your life and the lives of hundreds of others?’
I was flailing, trying to guess what she wanted to hear rather than saying what I thought. Which was the worst thing I could do. ‘If it was for the role. I would be happy to – to go as far as I needed to for the role.’
Maxine’s usual un-reactiveness was gone. She tilted her head, a questioning gesture of moral disgust, as if in disbelief that she’d heard me right. ‘What if you had a boyfriend?’
‘I would go – ahead – and tell him afterwards.’ I was bobbing my head up and down, trying to signal that I meant what I said, that I was trustworthy.
Maxine’s girlfriend pretence had vanished. ‘So you’d cheat to get information.’
I had wanted the job with MI5 more than I ever wanted anything, and I had got so far and so close after multiple tests of my situational judgement and core skills. But it was rushing away from me faster than water down a drain.
Maxine shook her head. She said the most important thing she ever said to me. The thing I would replay all the time.
‘You know, a physical relationship is not acceptable. You are making yourself vulnerable. It’s all about using this.’ She almost smiled. She placed a hand on each side of her head without actually touching it. ‘Rather than that’ – she lowered her hands from her breasts to her hips, again without touching herself – ‘to get what you need.’
There was nothing left for me to do. I knew the implications of what I had said, and that there was no recovering from it.
‘I think,’ said Maxine, ‘that this brings your interview to an end.’
When I was very little, my grandmother often chose my bedtime stories from Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children. Her favourite had a huge mouthful of a title. ‘MATILDA Who told Lies, and was Burned to Death.’ This was probably because my grandmother
